Daily Archives: November 21, 2011

If you’re a photographer spending Thanksgiving or Christmas weekend on the Oregon coast, the Oregon King Tide Photo Project would like your help.

The project seeks photographs documenting the unusually high tides known as King Tides, in an effort to better understand which areas of the coast might be most vulnerable to rising sea levels related to climate change.

This season’s King Tides are predicted to occur on Oregon shores November 24th-27th, 2011, December 23rd-25th, 2011 and January 20th-23rd, 2012.

Taking part is easy:

Choose a site to photograph

Pick a day and time to photograph high water levels

Take the photographs, noting the location, date, time of day, and the direction you are facing as you take the picture. Data from a GPS data can be particularly valuable.

The project hopes eventually to get photo-documentation of the highest tides along accessible shorelines of all Oregon estuaries. Most important, according to their Website, are sidewalks, parking lots, wetlands and other low-lying areas next to the shore.

Photographs should be framed to show the water level against a recognizable object or marker that will be there later, so someone can return to the post at a later date and measure the high-tide level shown in the photograph. Before-and-after pictures showing average and extreme high water levels at the same location are particularly useful.

The King Tide project is sponsored by the Climate Adaptation Planning Information System, an interagency partnership including Oregon Sea Grant, the state Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Program, the US Geologic Survey, and multiple NOAA and NASA units. Similar projects take place in California, Washington and British Columbia.